Figlio

Tonight I'm going out with my very dear, darling best friend for our somewhat weekly Slursday celebration; a tradtion dating back to our college days. Or, well, hers really, but that's another story. Usually, this involves rum & coke; vodka & cranberry and a dingy cheap bar. But we're getting on in years and cutting back. Actually, that's probably a big, fat boozey lie. We're trying to tart it up and just go to dinner. She's meeting me in Uptown and I was trying to come up with someplace to go within walking distance of my apartment.
My first thought was Figlio's. It's not that it's a fabulous restaurant. It's not particularly cheap or hip(take down the pink neon already!) It's just consistently consistent. Even the time I had the waiter who had apparently just done an 8 ball before he made it to our table, things were as to be expected. He was very informative, too. Lots and lots of information and staring at my cigarettes.
A couple of weeks ago I was out to happy hour with a couple of my coworkers and we decided to go to Tryg's. I didn't have a good feeling when I noticed the handle on the door was covered in some kind of weird, unraveling rafia and the place is only a few months old. We sat in the cold bar. My friend noticed the alikeness of all the ladies at the tables around us. Some kind of singular corporate desperation hung over the two tables flanking the bar. And did I mention we were sitting there? Yup, nearly empty bar, sitting. Waiting. Finally, we got a surly waitress, two vodka martinis that weren't what we ordered, the nastiest calamari (that haunted us the day after) and some kind of bizarre trio of cold goat cheese swathed in dry spices. I cannot even begin to imagine what that was supposed to be, because no food loving chef would ever accost a cheese like that. It's just wrong. Anyway, by the time our third friend joined us I was paying the bill. Despite the fact that we didn't eat anything or even get to the halfway point of the vodkas, the waitress didn't seem to think the fact that I was gagging, twiching and nervously glancing over my shoulder at the door was out of the ordinary. Maybe she knows the 8 ball guy.
Well, after that wretched experience, I was really far too sober to let my happy hour go. Oh, no. We needed drinks, we needed food and we needed the comfort of knowing that it would NOT suck. And you know where we went? You're goddamn right. We went to Figlio. It was static, it was warm and it was just fine thank you very much.